A Variational Approach to Scripts

Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them

Flow has been described as a state of optimal performance, experienced universally across a broad range of domains: from art to athletics, gaming to writing. However, its phenomenal characteristics can, at first glance, be puzzling. Firstly, individuals in flow supposedly report a loss of self-awareness, even though they perform in a manner which seems to evince their agency and skill. Secondly, flow states are felt to be effortless, despite the prerequisite complexity of the tasks that engender them. In this paper, we unpick these features of flow, as well as others, through the active inference framework, which posits that action and perception are forms of active Bayesian inference directed at sustained self-organisation; i.e., the minimisation of variational free energy. We propose that the phenomenology of flow is rooted in the deployment of high precision weight over (i) the expected sensory consequences of action and (ii) beliefs about how action will sequentially unfold. This computational mechanism thus draws the embodied cognitive system to minimise the ensuing (i.e., expected) free energy through the exploitation of the pragmatic affordances at hand. Furthermore, given the challenging dynamics the flow-inducing situation presents, attention must be wholly focussed on the unfolding task whilst counterfactual planning is restricted, leading to the attested loss of the sense of self-as-object. This involves the inhibition of both the sense of self as a temporally extended object and higher-order, meta-cognitive forms of self-conceptualisation. Nevertheless, we stress that self-awareness is not entirely lost in flow. Rather, it is pre-reflective and bodily. Our approach to bodily-action-centred phenomenology can be applied to similar facets of seemingly agentive experience beyond canonical flow states, providing insights into the mechanisms of so-called selfless experiences, embodied expertise and wellbeing.

Feeling our place in the world: an active inference account of self-esteem

Self-esteem, the evaluation of one's own worth or value, is a critical aspect of psychological well-being and mental health. In this paper, we propose an active inference account of self-esteem, casting it as a sociometer or an inferential capacity to interpret one's standing within a social group. This approach allows us to explore the interaction between an individual's self-perception and the expectations of their social environment.When there is a mismatch between these perceptions and expectations, the individual needs to adjust their actions or update their self-perception to better align with their current experiences. We also consider this hypothesis in relation with recent research on affective inference, suggesting that self-esteem enables the individual to track and respond to this discrepancy through affective states such as anxiety or positive affect. By acting as an inferential sociometer, self-esteem allows individuals to navigate and adapt to their social environment, ultimately impacting their psychological well-being and mental health.

Reading minds or reading scripts? De-intellectualising theory of mind

Understanding the origins of human social cognition is a central challenge in contemporary science. In recent decades, the idea of a 'Theory of Mind' (ToM) has emerged as the most popular way of explaining unique features of human social cognition. This default view has been progressively undermined by research on 'implicit' ToM, which suggests that relevant precursor abilities may already be present in preverbal human infants and great apes. However, this area of research suffers from conceptual difficulties and empirical limitations, including explanatory circularity, over-intellectualisation, and inconsistent empirical replication. Our article breaks new ground by adapting 'script theory' for application to both linguistic and non-linguistic agents. It thereby provides a new theoretical framework able to resolve the aforementioned issues, generate novel predictions, and provide a plausible account of how individuals make sense of the behaviour of others. Script theory is based on the premise that pre-verbal infants and great apes are capable of basic forms of agency-detection and non-mentalistic goal understanding, allowing individuals to form event-schemata that are then used to make sense of the behaviour of others. We show how script theory circumvents fundamental problems created by ToM-based frameworks, explains patterns of inconsistent replication, and offers important novel predictions regarding how humans and other animals understand and predict the behaviour of others.

The tendency of the schematic structure to maintain stability can be interpreted as mental inertia

This paper incorporates schematic concepts related to mental inertia and provides an avenue for interpreting psychology using the principles of classical mechanics. Schemas find wide application in diverse fields, ranging from ergonomics to psychotherapy. Nonetheless, it is crucial to incorporate schemas themselves into a more unified and comprehensive theoretical framework. Drawing upon the free energy principle (FEP) and the second law of thermodynamics, it is evident that humans possess a natural inclination to construct and maintain consistent cognitive structures. This characteristic contributes to the stability of schemas within a defined range. The particular scope of the model is closely intertwined with its structure, leading to variations among individuals in diverse environments. The coherence of the schema within a defined range can be perceived as the magnitude of mental inertia. This psychological analogy emphasizes the importance of considering the influences exerted by the external environment and their effects on mental inertia when predicting the human mind and behavior.

Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Crowd Sound Dynamics

When multiple individuals interact in a conversation or as part of a large crowd, emergent structures and dynamics arise that are behavioral properties of the interacting group rather than of any individual member of that group. Recent work using traditional signal processing techniques and machine learning has demonstrated that global acoustic data recorded from a crowd at a basketball game can be used to classify emergent crowd behavior in terms of the crowd's purported emotional state. We propose that the description of crowd behavior from such global acoustic data could benefit from nonlinear analysis methods derived from dynamical systems theory. Such methods have been used in recent research applying nonlinear methods to audio data extracted from music and group musical interactions. In this work, we used nonlinear analyses to extract features that are relevant to the behavioral interactions that underlie acoustic signals produced by a crowd attending a sporting event. We propose that recurrence dynamics measured from these audio signals via recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) reflect information about the behavioral dynamics of the crowd itself. We analyze these dynamics from acoustic signals recorded from crowds attending basketball games, and that were manually labeled according to the crowds' emotional state across six categories: angry noise, applause, cheer, distraction noise, positive chant, and negative chant. We show that RQA measures are useful to differentiate the emergent acoustic behavioral dynamics between these categories, and can provide insight into the recurrence patterns that underlie crowd interactions.

Resilience and active inference

In this article, we aim to conceptualize and formalize the construct of resilience using the tools of active inference, a new physics-based modeling approach apt for the description and analysis of complex adaptive systems. We intend this as a first step toward a computational model of resilient systems. We begin by offering a conceptual analysis of resilience, to clarify its meaning, as established in the literature. We examine an orthogonal, threefold distinction between meanings of the word "resilience": (i) inertia, or the ability to resist change (ii) elasticity, or the ability to bounce back from a perturbation, and (iii) plasticity, or the ability to flexibly expand the repertoire of adaptive states. We then situate all three senses of resilience within active inference. We map resilience as inertia onto high precision beliefs, resilience as elasticity onto relaxation back to characteristic (i.e., attracting) states, and resilience as plasticity onto functional redundancy and structural degeneracy.

Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its Fluidity

This paper aims to show that genders are enacted, by providing an account of how an individual can be said to enact a gender and explaining how, consequently, genders can be fluid. On the enactive-ecological view we defend, individuals first and foremost perceive the world as fields of affordances, that is, structured sets of action possibilities. Fields of natural affordances offer action possibilities because of the natural properties of organisms and environments. Handles offer graspability to humans because of physical-structural properties of handles and the anatomical-physiological properties of humans. Although humans live in fields of bodily, action, and cultural affordances, our work focuses on cultural affordances, where action possibilities are offered to individuals because of the normative responses of individuals in that culture. Knocking on a door affords entrance because knocking provides cultured individuals on the other side of the door an affordance to which they themselves behave normatively. Usually, behaving normatively in response to cultural affordances brings about sequences of perception-action loops, which we will call "scripts": for instance, closed doors afford knocking, which affords the individual inside opening the door, which affords an interpersonal meeting, which (may) afford entrance. Although the notion of script has a strong cognitivist flavor, one of the aims of the paper to provide an ecological account of scripts, to show that what cognitivists viewed as representations (or representational structures) are in fact environmentally structured perception-action loops. On our account of gender, gendered cultures build and maintain gendered cultural affordance landscapes, that is, landscapes in which the action possibilities individuals face are normed according to a specific body type or situation; most often (assigned) biological sex. Individuals enact a given gender when they come to perceive the affordances reserved for one gender by their culture and respond in the culturally normative way, thus enacting gendered sequences of perception-action loops (i.e., gendered scripts). With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by several recent social, technological, and epistemic developments in some cultures, the gendered landscapes of affordances offered to individuals in these cultures have become more varied and less rigid, thus increasing the variety and flexibility of scripts individuals can enact. This entails that individuals in such cultures have an increased possibility for gender fluidity, which may in part explain the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary.

Epistemic Communities under Active Inference

The spread of ideas is a fundamental concern of today’s news ecology. Understanding the dynamics of the spread of information and its co-option by interested parties is of critical importance. Research on this topic has shown that individuals tend to cluster in echo-chambers and are driven by confirmation bias. In this paper, we leverage the active inference framework to provide an in silico model of confirmation bias and its effect on echo-chamber formation. We build a model based on active inference, where agents tend to sample information in order to justify their own view of reality, which eventually leads to them to have a high degree of certainty about their own beliefs. We show that, once agents have reached a certain level of certainty about their beliefs, it becomes very difficult to get them to change their views. This system of self-confirming beliefs is upheld and reinforced by the evolving relationship between an agent’s beliefs and observations, which over time will continue to provide evidence for their ingrained ideas about the world. The epistemic communities that are consolidated by these shared beliefs, in turn, tend to produce perceptions of reality that reinforce those shared beliefs. We provide an active inference account of this community formation mechanism. We postulate that agents are driven by the epistemic value that they obtain from sampling or observing the behaviours of other agents. Inspired by digital social networks like Twitter, we build a generative model in which agents generate observable social claims or posts (e.g., ‘tweets’) while reading the socially observable claims of other agents that lend support to one of two mutually exclusive abstract topics. Agents can choose which other agent they pay attention to at each timestep, and crucially who they attend to and what they choose to read influences their beliefs about the world. Agents also assess their local network’s perspective, influencing which kinds of posts they expect to see other agents making. The model was built and simulated using the freely available Python package pymdp. The proposed active inference model can reproduce the formation of echo-chambers over social networks, and gives us insight into the cognitive processes that lead to this phenomenon.

Active Inference and Cooperative Communication: An Ecological Alternative to the Alignment View

We present and contrast two accounts of cooperative communication, both based on Active Inference, a framework that unifies biological and cognitive processes. The mental alignment account, defended in Vasil et al., takes the function of cooperative communication to be the alignment of the interlocutor's mental states, and cooperative communicative behavior to be driven by an evolutionarily selected adaptive prior belief favoring the selection of action policies that promote such an alignment. We argue that the mental alignment account should be rejected because it neglects the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication, which skews its view of the dynamics of communicative interaction. We introduce our own conception of cooperative communication, inspired by a more radical ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. Cooperative communication, on our ecological conception, serves to guide and constrain the dynamics of the cooperative interaction via the construction and restructuring of shared fields of affordances, in order to reach the local goals of the joint actions in which episodes of cooperative communication are embedded. We argue that our ecological conception provides a better theoretical standpoint to account for the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication in the active inference framework.